For the Love of Yoga

I obviously think this^^ is a very catchy title. I wrote an article for Yoganonymous (a now defunct yoga news site) back in 2013. I had since forgotten, but just rediscovered it while trying to find the flyer I was working on for my upcoming Yoga workshop of a very similar title (Feb 17th: register here, it’s gonna be great!).

After rereading the article (reprinted below), I realize that 5 years later I feel pretty much identical to when I wrote this article. Even though I am now a yoga teacher, I still struggle with having a fulfilling personal practice. If you feel similarly, you are in luck, because I have some pretty exciting news!

Cayce Lannon and I are teaming up to offer free yoga every Thursday morning at the Rosemont Studio Collective starting February 1st. The beauty of it is this: we aren’t teaching! That’s right, you can develop your own personal practice, while still getting the warm fuzzies from being in a room full of people practicing yoga. This will be an hour of time where you can check out what your fellow yogis are doing while working on your personal yoga groove! Practice time is from 7:30am – 8:30am. We hope to see you on your mat!

Let me just start by saying I love yoga. I love the way it makes me body feel. I love the way it clears my mind. I love the way it looks. And I love that I always meet great people when I go to yoga classes.

What I don’t love is that I don’t always have $15 or $20 to throw at a yoga studio and I just can’t seem to focus enough to do yoga at home. Don’t get me wrong. I think it is great that people are making a living teaching yoga, I wish I could make a living teaching yoga. I just don’t always have that kind of money though, to attend a class, much less get trained as a yoga teacher.

So every new year and with every shift in my routine I always promise myself that this will be the month that I actually get up in the morning and do some blessed yoga. But pretty much every time I eventually slip away from goal, and into an extra 5 minutes of sleep.

I think this is the problem: when I do downdog, I can’t stop thinking about all those dust bunnies under the bed; in pigeon pose, I realize the floor could really stand to be cleaned; during savasana I think, is 5 minutes up yet…I should probably get moving. I know I must not be the only one out here. The one who loves yoga, and really wants to do it all the time, but for some reason just can’t make it happen. So for all the rest of you wanna-be-yogis out there, here is my advice and my question.

Advice: The best success I have had keeping up a regular practice was after deciding to pick a youtube yoga video and do the same routine every morning. Try it. It can be with you anywhere you go, on your phone or a friends computer. It gives you someone to follow along with and eventually once you do every morning, you can remember enough to do it on your own when the wifi is down. Here is my favorite video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Xfqio9l3x4

Question: How do you do it? How do you get around not having enough money to pay for a class? Or not having the motivation to do yoga on your own, without all those other lovely yogis to om with? Please tell me. Because like I said, I love yoga and I want to do it everyday.